July 24, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Baseball fans with mobile phones who watched the Washington Nationals play the Houston Astros last week were invited to support Children’s National Medical Center’s work to fight pediatric diabetes by sending a text message to make an instant $5 donation, which was then charged to their wireless-phone bill.
Prompted by scoreboard and broadcast announcements several times throughout the game, people attending the game as well as home viewers were asked to make a gift by text messaging the term “NATS” to the number “90999.”
For every text message received, $4.75 will go to the medical center for its work to combat juvenile diabetes. To cover processing costs, 5 percent of each donation will go to the Mobile Giving Foundation, which is working with the Washington Nationals and MLB.com on the fund-raising effort, which kicked off on July 10 and will continue through July 31.
The cell-phone campaign is raising money for the Pediatric Diabetes Care Complex, a 6,500-square-foot facility that will be dedicated to clinical treatment and educational studies about diabetes in children. The Washington Nationals Dream Foundation has pledged $2-million to support the project, which will cost an estimated $5-million to complete.
In Greenville, S.C., the city’s minor-league baseball team, the Greenville Drive, is undertaking a similar effort to raise $10,000 this season to help the Children’s Hospital of the Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center purchase a piece of medical equipment called the Vein Viewer. The device, which costs about $30,000, illuminates hard-to-find veins in children so they won’t face repeated needle piercing.
Since June 15, home-game advertisements have run on the stadium’s JumboTron to ask fans to text the letters “VTD,” which stands for Virtual Toy Drive, to the number “90999″ to make a $5 donation. Eighty-five percent of that amount will go to the hospital. Ten percent of each donation goes to the Mobile Giving Foundation and 5 percent to Mobile Accord, a company in Denver that helps nonprofit groups use mobile technology.
Dania Beck, a fund raiser at the Greenville Hospital System, says that it’s too early in the campaign to measure results.
“It’s still in such an infancy stage and we’re trying to do other things to help promote it,” she says. “People know how to text, but the idea of texting a donation is still new, and I don’t think people are quite sure how it works yet.”
